Of course it's very hampering being a detective,
when you don't know anything about detecting,
and when nobody knows that you're doing detection,
and you can't have people up to
cross-examine them, and you have neither the energy
nor the means to make proper inquiries; and,
in short, when you're doing the whole thing in a
thoroughly amateur, haphazard way.
-A.A. Milne (The Red House Mystery)

A.A. Milne is, of course, best remembered for his series of Winnie the
Pooh tales. In addition, he wrote for the famous British humor magazine
Punch, was a fine playwright and, though he served in WWI, became an outspoken
pacifist. In the midst of all this, he wrote one of the classic English
drawing room mysteries--The Red House Mystery. The book ends
on a note which seems to imply that further adventures will follow, but
sadly none did.

The Red House is a British manor, home to Mark Ablett, and gathering
place for his fun loving friends. But the bucolic setting is disrupted
when Ablett's long lost brother, black sheep of the family, is murdered
and Mark goes missing. Two guests, Antony Gillingham, a sort of Holmsian
jack of all trades, and Bill Beverley, a mildly dense Watson-like sidekick,
take it upon themselves to solve the crime. What follows is a reasonably
dated but still amusing "intuitive" mystery. Raymond Chandler apparently
went out of his way to attack the story as one of the worst examples of
the genre, wholly lacking in genuine criminological methodology and requiring
enormous intuitive leaps on the part of the "detectives". Still,
take it for what it is and it offers a pleasant enough reading experience.